[Illustration: Storm King Peak and Mineral Lake, viewed from near Mineral Lake Inn.]
Early one evening, last summer, I went with a friend to Point Defiance, Tacoma's fine park at the { p.021} end of the promontory on which the city is built. We drank in refreshment from the picture there unrolled of broad channels and evergreen shores. As sunset approached, we watched the western clouds building range upon range of golden mountains above the black, Alp-like crags of the Olympics. Then, entering a small boat, we rowed far out northward into the Sound. Overhead, and about us, the scenes of the great panorama were swiftly shifted. The western sky became a conflagration. Twilight settled upon the bay. The lights of the distant town came out, one by one, and those of the big smelter, near by, grew brilliant. No Turner ever dreamed so glorious a composition of sunlight and shade. But we were held by one vision.
[Illustration { p.019}: View from Electron, showing west side of the mountain, with a vast intervening country of forested ranges and deep canyons.]
... "Where the mountain wall Is piled to heaven, and through the narrow rift Of the vast rocks, against whose rugged feet Beats the mad torrent with perpetual roar: Where noonday is as twilight, and the wind Comes burdened with the everlasting moan Of forests and far-off waterfalls."--Whittier.]
Yonder, in the southeast, towering above the lower shadows of harbor and hills, rose a vast pyramid of soft flame. The setting sun had thrown a mantle of rose pink over the ice of the glaciers and the great cleavers of rock which buttress the mighty dome. The rounded summit was warm with beautiful orange light. Soon the colors upon its slope changed to deeper reds, and then to amethyst, and { p.023} violet, and pearl gray. The sun-forsaken ranges below fell away to dark neutral tints. But the fires upon the crest burned on, deepening from gold to burnished copper, a colossal beacon flaming high against the sunset purple of the eastern skies. Finally, even this great light paled to a ghostly white, as the supporting foundation of mountain ridges dropped into the darkness of the long northern twilight, until the snowy summit seemed no longer a part of earth, but a veil of uncanny mist, caught up by the winds from the Pacific and floating far above the black sky-line of the solid Cascades, that